These are items which I thought didn't fit right on the news page, but I want people to be aware of these injustices.
Hatfield Miners Welfare Grounds, Dunscroft.
Letter to Helen Liddell, Minister of Energy, 1/9/2000 in response to her newsletter.
Scrounger Gordon Brown fiddles �4Billion from the hard working miners pension fund
Chronic Bronchitis - Blair's Mining Disaster
Hatfield Miners Welfare Grounds, Dunscroft.
Can I again on behalf of the NUM raise my concerns on the fate of the above grounds. The latest concern is raised by the leaflet of Toni Wilkinson prospective Hatfield Town Councillor, in which she asks what people wish to see on the welfare grounds. This could, I hope, be a slip of the pen. However if not, I would again remind you that the terms of the agreement to transfer the grounds from the Hatfield Miners Welfare Scheme were quite specific. The NUM trustees insisted and the NCB / CISWO trustees agreed that the grounds would be handed over to Council control on the strict understanding that they would remain recreational green field sites for posterity. That is there would never be any building on the site, (other than small scale children's play devices which would not alter the status of a green field site, obviously). It concerns me that people think there is a blank cheque to do whatever they want with this space, when that is not the case. The Current managers of CISWO have no legal right to alter the terms laid down by the Hatfield Welfare and NUM Trustees who were the owners of the land, as their control post-dates the terms of the agreement. I would appreciate your assurance on the status of the land .
Faithfully,
David Douglass. NUM Branch Secretary Hatfield Main Branch.
Letter to Helen Liddell, Minister of Energy, 1/9/2000 in response to her newsletter.
Thank you for the newsletter. Can you explain why in the entire document, the National Union Of Mineworker achieves not a single mention ? Why is it that there is a special arrangement for the UDM but no arrangement at all for the NUM ? Why does an antiunion organisation have a more favourable position vis -a- vis your Government than a long standing Trade Union which represents 90% of all working miners and the vast majority of retired ones ?
You also seem not to understand that the major problem with the respiratory claims is the spirometry test itself. In order to achieve any result on the test you have to be quite fit, the more damaged your lungs, the less capacity you have, the more impossible becomes the test. It is a wonder to me how more men haven't died attempting the test which is harsh and cruel.
A further long standing injustice to miners with respiratory problems is the DSS FEV test. Where a man is found to have had the required length of service underground, and who have suffered chronic bronchitis and emphysema with all the loss of faculty that goes with it, and who subsequently die from the condition, it is an utter outrage that the DSS will not award posthumous claims or reviews unless there is in life evidence of FEV loss.
This is so even where the pathologist records the decline in health and subsequent death as being caused by his employment and where the coroner records a verdict of industrial death due to C.B.& E. It is clear to anyone that when someone has died from lung disease he has NO FEV, it follows that for some time up to the death the man�s loss of FEV will be self evident since he is dying of lack of lung capacity. Your government has chosen however to allow this gross injustice against the miners to continue.
I would be interested in your view as to when these injustices will be redressed.
Faithfully David Douglass
Mining Community Advice Centre Doncaster.
Scrounger Gordon Brown fiddles �4Billion from the hard working miners pension fund.
Thousands of Hard working miners, Tens of thousands of old retired men and widows of miners killed by the Coal Board have been robbed by New Labour of �4 Billion which was intended for Miners pensions.
The government which has never paid one penny piece into the scheme has grabbed the cash surplus which should have been used to increase the pathetically poor pensions, some as little as �1 per week.
The surplus accumulated from Miners invested funds should have been used to bring in retirement and a full pension at 50 for all miners, working and redundant. It should have been used to make up existing pensions to modern rates, instead Blair and Brown the Pension Fund Scroungers and Fiddlers have taken it .
They attempt to justify the crime by saying, they underwrite the fund ! The richest Pension fund in the world, get f....d off ! The fund has such a range of investments it cannot be in deficit and in any case a portion of the fund in held in reserve each surplus to pay for such a contingency be it ever so remote. The government "underwrites" nothing it is simply a lie.
Some liberal pillocks have requested that the government use the surplus to regenerate the blighted coalfield areas. Well bollocks to that, this is not their money, its the miners money and is intended for pensions not bailing out governments or propping up crumbling pit villages, which by the way ought to be done from the massive taxes already taken from the backs of the miners for generations in taxes and NI contributions. Its a bit like being broken into and having your savings stolen and some fool suggesting perhaps the thief might use some of the stolen money to buy you some new windows !Its not their money !!
The latest MPS circular informs us , that despite protests and suggestions from the MPS Trustees, the government "doesn't think it would be useful" to give us back the money governments have already taken or not to take any more out of this latest surplus. Can anyone think of anything "useful" to do with this government ? Pensioners should not be fobbed off, write to your MP, Tory Blair and Mr Brown and the MPS demanding they stop taking our money and that they refund the money taken so far.
This Government had already continued a nasty legacy of robbing the miners, taking disablement pensions from men crippled with lung diseases and mining injuries, and giving them a poxy �10 a week instead . Robbing the Reduced Earnings Allowance and Hot Meal Provision from men because they had reached 65.
The robbery of the miners suffering chest diseases is a disgraceful story in its own right and is covered elsewhere, it is utterly despicable.
BLAIR AND BROWN YOU'VE BEEN CAUGHT FIDDLING THE PENSION FUND !
WE DEMAND YOU REPAY THE �4 BILLION YOU'VE NICKED YOU ROBBING B.......�S !
Chronic Bronchitis
- Blair's Mining
Disaster
We are frequently told "the old working class" doesn't exist anymore, and this is Illustrated by the decimation of the coal industry, with the loss of more than 250,000 jobs in the last 25 years and the destruction of whole coalfields and most collieries. Only 19 remain throughout the island, and there future is bleak. (The latest government sponsored report predicts the end of mining in Britain within five or six years.)
But where did that "old working class" go to ? They weren't shipped off to gas chambers, though doubtless Thatcher would have enjoyed that. The pit communities, minus the actual pit, and everywhere beleaguered and under siege by poverty, deprivation, hopelessness and antisocial crime, still exist. The folk within those communities remain, working class, often highly class conscious and fully aware of a social system which has robbed them and abused them for centuries.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the issue of lung diseases, caused by coal and stone dust, it has destroyed an army of men, and probably, though still unproved women in the pit community too. (There is an excess mortality rate for Chronic Bronchitis and Emphysema, among women in pit communities of around 50% )
Two centuries ago they were telling us coal dust was "natural" it came from trees and was organic and couldn't be alien to the human system. As machine mining increased so the death toll rose. As the miners union struggled to claim compensation for ever increasing numbers of stricken miners the medical profession fell in behind the coal owners who often employed them or patronised them. The miners lung disease was not pneumoconiosis which was compensable but chronic bronchitis and / or emphysema which was not. As often as not the family of the miners would have to wait until the miners died and an autopsy revealed the extent of coal dust penetration of his lungs before compensation, measly though it was, was recovered.
After years of medical argument, and after most mining countries in the world had long ago recognised it, chronic bronchitis and emphysema were finally recognised in 1993 as industrial diseases, for state benefit purposes but NOT as had happened abroad in its own right. To qualify you needed 20 years underground, without exception. So if you had 19 years underground and became afflicted with the disease and hospitalised for the final year of your life before dying of the condition, to the DSS you didn't have it, choose what the medical profession said on this occasion.
Next you had to have simple pneumoconiosis as well , and this of course was to be demonstrated by x-rays. Category one pneumoconiosis is extremely hard to see on X-ray, and in any case the Chronic Bronchitis can obscure it, and the emphysema causing the lungs to shred and disintegrate under the impact of constant irritation and coughing tended to disperse and loose the dust particles after they had done the damage. Once more we were faced with the crime of having to wait until the miner died, often in excruciating pain and suffocation, before the autopsy revealed the presence of pneumoconiosis, contrary to the X-ray evidence, cat 1 or 2.
What happens next, is one of the most glaring injustices of modern times. I go to a Fresh Evidence Medical Board on behalf of the families, the Dr agrees yes the man did have Cat 1 or Cat 2 pneumoconiosis, which was found on Macro examination and under histology (microscopic research). BUT the regulations say it has to be found on X-ray examination, i.e. a scientific guess from the outside of the body. Come On ! You tell yourself this isn't the 19th Century, such blatant class injustice is a figment of anarcho-paronioa, this is some fool doddery old Dr who has dropped a bollock. So I take the cases to the Medical Appeal Tribunal, they too make the same judgement. I then appeal the question to the Social Security Commissioner in London, and argue that the requirement is for the presence of pneumoconiosis. Obviously the only test for that during life is an X-ray and that is why it is mentioned. After death, there is a clear none contradictable test, the pathologist takes out and looks at the lung, feels the dust with her fingers, cuts a piece out and looks at it down a microscope and can see it. The presence of the dust is the requirement, not the means of establishing it, which is a simple administrative device and not a requirement in itself. The Commissioner in his lordly wisdom announces that my logic is impeccable, but that the regulation is that the dust can only be found by X-ray and not by any other means, where pneumoconiosis is discovered by autopsy it is deemed NOT to exist because it wasn't earlier found by X-ray !
(In 1997 the regulations were changed so that new cases didn't require the presence of pneumoconiosis, cases arising before that time would not however be retrospectively reviewed. The 20 year requirement has been modified to allow for "months" of illness caused by the presence of the disease, so the more ill you were, the less chance you have of getting round the 20 year rule).
The final requirement is that there be an FEV loss of 1 ltr. equivalent on the Cotes formula. Basically you have to have lost a quarter of your lungs capacity to breath in and out.
This test was included for the sole purpose of taking something like 70,000 miners out of entitlement to the benefit, it is as crude as that. The FEV test is supposed to test the miners lung capacity against an average none miner of equal weight and size. Problem is the test samples were done on the average population of the 1940�s and 50�s when people in general had suffered at least one world war, some had been exposed to gas in the first, nearly everybody smoked and the cities were blighted with smog which killed sizeable chunks of the population. Your average citizen in them days was far more unhealthy than the average citizen of today, so the test provides not a comparison with the population of today but those of 50 years ago, so the miner has to be almost 100% less healthy than the average person rather than 50% as is supposedly required. The test is a sham.
The change of government, has made not the slightest difference to the continuing slaughter or the rip off of the miners and their families.
After 12 years of legal action against the NCB, in the longest running and most expensive legal claim in the world, the miners finally proved that they were liable. New Labour in opposition promised "Justice for the miners". Last year alone 16,000 miners died from chronic bronchitis and emphysema, a mining disaster so vast, that had it happened underground in rock falls or explosions would generate an outcry. Instead it happens in the miners own home, in private, away from the interest of the media or the politicians. 100,000 claims were registered against the Coal Board, now represented by the DTI.
Justice, Like Hell ! True to Blair�s Tory roots they refused point blank to sit down with the Miners Union who represents 90% of all miners working or retired and work out a compensation scheme. The NUM is Blair�s class enemy and turned instead to an alliance of Lawyers nation-wide to draw up a scheme, it is fraught with injustice and legal and technical somersaults aimed at robbing the miners of any claim. Despite the announcement that �2B is set aside to meet the claims and settlements were around �50,000 with the press crowing about "massive payouts", the reality is different. Only 1500 men out of the 100,000 victims have been paid out. The average I encounter is �5000 with �3000 being a typical sum. Men like my old work mate Benny Marks, 46 years a face worker in blinding blizzards of dust shovelling rock and coal, is awarded �1200 ! For a disease almost certain to be fatal. Why settle ? Because you have twice as much chance of dying as being paid out before you do.
( Exception to prove the rule ONE man has been awarded the maximum �60,000 payment )
Many solicitors are urging men to take what's on offer or they might not get anything. Other men who worked at pits which were closed and the work records destroyed are told they cannot claim at all because there is no record on them being underground, despite long service awards, union membership records and a Miners Pension.
The required Spirometer test was supposed to be less severe than the DSS one, in reality it is more harsh. Old miners are bullied and yelled at and told to blow harder, that they are faking, that the test is not being complied with. Dr�s at these centres having been described as "Nazi�s" by men who have not the physical strength or lung capacity to blow at the fierce rate demanded by the test. Whereas before , the scam was to say the miner didn't have the compensable pneumoconiosis he had the non-compensatable Chronic Bronchitis, or Emphysema, now the man is told he doesn't have CB&E; which is compensable he has asthma which isn't. This is despite having 80 % or 90% awards from the already stringent DSS FEV test.
( Asthma itself is another injustice, despite exposure to coal dust, stone dust, asbestos, shot firing fumes, diesel fumes, methane, monoxide, sulphur, nitrates and heavy metals and toxic oils, the Commissioners decided the lethal combination did not cause asthma, it merely made it worse so there is no entitlement to Industrial Injuries Benefits. )
Vultures and Cowboys Bloodsucking Lawyers
Because the government has blocked the involvement of the NUM as a national force and farmed out and encouraged claimants to sink their lot in with private legal firms, the miners or their widows find that the pathetic bit of compensation is further eaten into by these bloodsuckers. 25% they take from victims, even the �2000 interim payment paid to miners with a prima-facie case so they have something before they die, or to widow at the time she most needs financial assistance, the law firm will nonetheless take �500 of her money. Such firms have run nation-wide adverts, even been given free adverts on BBC and ITV for their �No Win No Fee;� schemes. Despite their legal requirement to give claimants the best advice available, they refuse to pass the claimants back to the NUM or NACODS the mining unions which charge either nothing at all or a small administration charge, so they plunder the victims pathetic compensation .The sums are pathetic, when comparing the dying miners �5000 with the London Executive who in DEC 99 was awarded �1 million compensation for sex discrimination, or even the Humberside cop who got �190,000 compensation because her colleagues had "hurt her feelings". The class bias couldn't be more clear but there is more and its getting worse.
Disablement Benefit, Reduced Earnings Allowance & Disability Living Allowance.
If you succeeded in getting the award, obviously you were never going to get better. The awards were made for life. You would continue to receive your Disablement Benefit depending on the degree of you disability. Men who were dying received �80 a week or more. Because your condition had stopped you working and gave you a lower income you were entitled to Reduced Earnings Allowance of �42 per week again for life. Under the entitlement to Disability Living Allowance, or Attendance Allowance , because of your disability (or combination of disabilities, since most miners have more than one industrial disease) you were entitled to a small payment because you were unable to make yourself a hot meal.
Now both this Tory Government like the last Tory government has decided that when you get to 65 "your life" is over. The Dis-Ben and REA are reduced to a measly �10 per week Retirement Allowance, while the Hot Meal provision is withdrawn altogether when you get to 65. At 65 they conclude they cant exploit you anymore so you aren't entitled to a hot meal.
Posthumous appeals, fresh evidence reviews.
Last in the long saga of injustice is the right to a fresh evidence appeal or review.
Suppose a miner claimed for pneumoconiosis back in 1979, the NCB X-rays had told him he had "a little dust not enough to claim". The DSS likewise tell him he has no dust all. He leaves the pits in 1985 and in 1990 he dies . At autopsy we discover he is riddled with pneumoconiosis, he has PMF (Progressive Massive Fibrosis, the highest level of the disease) which is cavitating. He has not been exposed to dust since 85, although we know he had some in 79. Previously I would have applied for a Fresh Evidence Appeal or Review, on the basis that new evidence (the mans death and autopsy report) proved the earlier decision that he didn't have it was wrong. Where I was able to prove this, the DSS would make a finding that the man had in fact been suffering from the condition back to 79 or perhaps 85 depending on the evidence. ALL of those benefits to which the man would have been entitled are then paid to his widow or his estate. After all he had been entitled to them all along but was deprived by a wrong DSS judgement clearly demonstrated after death.
Suppose the man hadn't been advised by Drs or anybody else he had pneumo and hadn't made an application. We could apply posthumously, and again the same posthumous evidence presented. The Benefit would be paid back to the date of onset of the disease as established by a posthumous review of the medical evidence and all the benefit back paid.
Robbing The Dead
Both Governments have steadily been eating away at this right. Firstly they restricted the period of back claim to 12 months, then 3 months and now 1 month. However a loop hole still exists where we seek to review decisions which were made prior to the change of legislation, they can still be paid back to date of onset.
Recent evidence suggests Blair is now to abolish the right to fresh evidence and posthumous reviews and appeals altogether ! As part of his crusade against welfare benefits in general he is now prepared to attack and plunder the dead miners and their widows. No legal authority exists to do this yet, but our spies on the BA Tell us all recent applications are on hold and are not being actioned because they are expected word that Blair and his henchmen are to stop the appeals altogether.
Yet another sorry page in the class justice dispensed to miners and their families.
"The Old Working Class" is fully conscious of the system which oppressed and oppresses it. "The New Working Class" is currently learning the self same lesson.
Despite all the difficulties described above it is still essential miners and their families continue to pursue cases against the BA and the former NCB employers or current Private coal owners. People can contact me for advice.
[email protected]
David Douglass BA. MA
Mining Community Advice Centre
St. John's Hall
Emerson Avenue
Stainforth
Doncaster
Telephone: 01302 841 365 for information on office opening times.